Amazon Best Seller: Everything You Need to Know

The first step to earning customers on the Amazon marketplace is selling something people actually want. While Amazon sellers face a lot of different factors that influence success, picking the right products is one of the most important.

Amazon provides some basic tools to help you understand what kinds of products are the most popular with their customers. To gain insights into the product offerings most likely to pay off on the platform, look to the Amazon Best Seller rankings. Keep reading to learn how to find best-selling products on Amazon.

What is an Amazon Best Seller?

An Amazon Best Seller is a product that sells at the highest level in its respective category on the site. Many industry experts prepare lists of Amazon's top-selling items year by year. You can also browse Amazon Best Sellers by category directly on the platform. If you're wondering how to find a #1 Best Seller on Amazon, this is often a good place to start.

You can peruse a listing of the top 100 products in each of the top-level categories Amazon uses for classification, as well as within the subcategories it has created for each. For example, you can check the top sellers in Toys and Games, or go a level deeper to see the top products in Stuffed Animals and Plush Toys.

In addition, on the product page for each item on the site, you can find the item's bestseller ranking in the Product Information section of the page. It lists the product’s rank in each relevant category and subcategory.

How Does the Amazon Best Sellers Rank Work?

Amazon’s Best Sellers rankings look at both the quantity of products sold in a recent time frame along with historical data on sales. The rankings are determined in comparison with products in the same category. A product in the electronics section is ranked based on its performance against other electronics, not books or kitchen supplies.

If you see a big uptick in sales of a product, but fail to see much change in your ranking, it likely means other products in the category also sold more.

How Do I Earn an Amazon Best Seller Badge?

The vast majority of Amazon buyers use the search bar rather than navigating to the Amazon Best Seller page when deciding what to purchase, so how do these rankings influence sales? The main way is that items on the Best Seller list in a category earn an Amazon Best Seller badge.

The Amazon Best Seller badge, also written by some as the Amazon Bestseller badge, is an orange marking that shows up at the top of the product listing, which makes it stand out from other products in the results. It shows consumers that others have chosen your product, which can boost their interest in it.

There’s no big secret to earning a Best Seller Badge, you simply have to sell the most in your particular category. But there are steps you can take to increase your odds.

• List your products in relevant subcategories as well as broader categories. Earning a Best Seller badge in Cutting Boards is less competitive than getting that spot in Kitchen and Dining. But the top-selling cutting boards still get a badge, just like the top sellers in the broader category.
• Optimize your listings. When your listings rank higher in search, you’ll sell more.
• Encourage reviews. Reviews play an important role in convincing people to buy your product. Urge customers to leave reviews after every purchase.

Instead of manually requesting reviews for each order in Seller Central, you can use FeedbackFive by eComEngine to automatically reach out to buyers on your behalf.

The software makes it super easy to automatically send out Amazon’s Request a Review message (which also includes a request for seller feedback) or create your own branded review request - just be careful not to violate any of Amazon's policies! Either way, FeedbackFive saves you time by automating your requests and providing the detailed analytics you need to quickly identify review trends, evaluate your campaign effectiveness, visualize order volume, and much more.

You can even receive alerts for new ratings via SMS or email to closely monitor the performance of your products and make better business decisions.

Related reading: Amazon Seller Reputation KPIs: What to Watch

Using Product Research Tools to Track Top-Selling Products on Amazon

If you want to use the Amazon Best Sellers Rank to help make decisions about what inventory to stock and sell, you may find it’s an imperfect tool. While the list provides insights into what people are buying, its fast-moving nature makes it difficult to understand which items sell consistently over time.

The layout, which shows fifty items per page, per category, isn't suited to show you trends at scale. For businesses serious about stocking a lot of products that want large-scale, long-term insights, you'll want to employ more sophisticated product research tools to dig deeper into the data.

Related reading: How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon

Be sure to pay attention to things like:

• Sales rank
• Keyword ranking
• Category
• Number of sellers
• Average price
• Average daily sales
• FBA fees
• Unit weight
• Estimated profits

Historically, some of the best-selling product categories on Amazon have been Toys and Games, Baby, Books, Beauty and Personal Care, Electronics, and Home and Kitchen.

Final Note

While earning an Amazon Best Seller Badge can certainly feel like a big accomplishment and could lead to a boost in sales, it shouldn’t be a primary goal. The rankings change frequently, and the badge is likely to play a small role at best in how consumers decide what to purchase. Don’t let it become a distraction from more important goals, like increasing rankings and getting more reviews.